By CHRISTINE EVANS, Workers Power USA
The incoming Trump administration has committed itself to deepening the current attacks on the rights of women and other oppressed sectors of the population. The direction in which Trump and his allies seem to be headed may be glimpsed in “Project 2025,” a document drafted last year by some of the new president’s close advisors and under the auspices of the far-right Heritage Foundation.
Project 2025 lays out a vision for directly attacking women, Queer, and other oppressed people’s rights. The document advocates a ban on abortion medication and the end of relatively easy “no fault” divorce. It projects a larger ideological offensive to stigmatize gender non-conformance, normalizing the “Christian” nuclear family model and returning to the acceptance of violence against unruly women.
An analysis of the far-right plan suggests that national legislation to criminalize abortion after 12 weeks is already in preparation. This is in addition to the effort reflected in legislation enacted by 13 of 50 states to attack bodily autonomy by making abortion illegal and via the anti-trans legislation enacted by 17 states. To this same end, there are states and federal efforts to increase the criminalization of women who fail to carry pregnancies to term as child killers, and to criminalize poor and working-class families as “unfit” for child rearing as part of a larger ideological project to normalize patriarchal notions of raising children. The latter is accompanied by the growing number of states newly allowing child labor in meatpacking, chicken processing, and other sectors.
In addition to direct attacks on women’s bodily autonomy and self-determination, Project 2025 targets 31 states in which the Trump team advocates weakening of child labor rules via “waivers” from landmark federal worker protection laws like the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). This process has been underway for some time. It coincides with a dramatic plan to weaken public education—removing the authority of the federal Department of Education, repressing teachers and professors who address social injustice, and legislating funds for private religious and racist academies, as well as home schooling. The entire package is designed to increase the vulnerability of women and gender non-conforming people, to enlarge the pool of workers willing to work for less than a survival wage, to cut federal social spending, and to deepen the inculcation of authoritarian psychology and norms.
Why are these attacks on the agenda now?
Capitalism is both a system of producing value and producing life. Through these processes, the system reproduces and reshapes itself physically and structurally. Attempts to reinforce traditional gender roles are a common response by the capitalist class to its economic woes. Similarly, the profiteers’ insistence that childcare, eldercare, emotional development, and the care of workers are a personal and individual responsibility, rather than a social one, saves the bosses billions. The expectation that this work is unpaid via the family or at low cost by women workers who are earning close to slave wages in institutional and commercial settings allows the bosses to reduce labor costs dramatically. Keeping wages low in areas of social reproduction, where women are employed out of proportion to their numbers and in precarious positions, impacts the struggle for livable wages for the whole class.
The far-right section of the ruling class seeks to deal with the current economic crisis by returning to the norms of social reproduction that prevailed before the gains of the Second Wave of the women’s movement in the 20th century and the later expansion of rights for LGBTQIA+ people. Most ominously, the far right is anxious to reestablish social expectations that facilitate unpaid labor for domestic work, cheaper female labor in commercial childcare and eldercare, child labor, and political authoritarianism with a strong current of misogyny and machismo.
Yet, both capitalist parties are complicit in these rollbacks. Although the Democrats give lip service to protecting bodily autonomy, they have collaborated in slashing social welfare. They have failed to secure reproductive justice legislatively or constitutionally on a national basis, and they have used coercion and threats to push the movement out of the streets and back into machine politics. All of the efforts initiated in 2020 when Trump was first elected were funneled right back into “get out the vote” efforts for the Democratic Party, with few results for us.
Building a working-class fightback
The only real solution to the chauvinism, racism, and sexism behind the ruling-class offensive is the elimination of the profit system. The only social force with enough potential power to do that is the organized working class—committed to Black self-determination and the rights of immigrants and other oppressed people, with women and Queer people in the front ranks. Those who produce the goods and run the transportation, energy, and communication systems are the only ones who could put a brake on the self-serving methods of the ruling class, and firmly anchor a new social order that puts human needs first.
Putting this process into action requires simultaneously building a mass movement in the streets whose power cannot be throttled by the big business political parties and creating a class-struggle left wing inside the current union movement. The latter would dramatically expand the reach of organized labor and put it at the service of the majority of working people and the oppressed.
If we can manage to jumpstart this kind of organizing, history shows that we can prevent reactionary advances and even roll back the rightward capitalist offensive. And if we can build this kind of movement, we will also have gone a long way toward creating the conditions in which working people can consider and prepare for the more fundamental solution of replacing the sexist and racist for-profit system once and for all.